savoring the beauty in the everyday

Saving my life: Morning Prayers edition.

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Morning Prayers, the brief service held every weekday at Harvard’s Memorial Church, across the Square from where I work.

I’ve been a sporadic attendee at Morning Prayers for a while, a more regular one this year, slipping into a pew to soak up the choral music and participate in the psalm readings, the Lord’s Prayer and the closing hymns. But this was my first time speaking there.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I chose to talk about what is saving my life now: reading a beloved passage by Barbara Brown Taylor, and explaining how that phrase of hers has captured and held my attention for several years. Here’s a snippet of my talk:

What is saving your life now?

It’s not a question I had ever considered in just this way, until I read it in Taylor’s book. I’d heard similar questions, phrased slightly differently: what are you grateful for? What’s making you happy these days?

But this question, with its insistence on what is vital, sneaked into my soul and set up camp there. And I’ve been amazed at the simple power of continuing to ask it. […]

It’s been a hard few months to live in the world – a hard year or so. I find myself need the reminder – and maybe you do too – that what can save our spiritual lives is the physical, embodied, daily experience of life on this earth. We are creatures who walk around in our bodies, breathing the air, dependent on food and drink for our survival, affected by our environment in a thousand ways, no matter how much we try to insist otherwise. As I kept asking this question, I found that, so often, what is saving my life now are the small things. Many of them are physical, tangible. And all of them are related to my daily, walking-around life in this world.

You can listen to the full service – just under 15 minutes – on the Memorial Church website. (My talk starts at about 4:25.) And as always, I’d love to hear about what is saving your life now.

Lovely, Katie! That book is on my TBR and it may move up on the list rather quickly.

It has been a stressful few months. There have been many hard days where worry and fear get me by the throat, where busyness and running leave me exhausted, and my brain just cannot process the news anymore.

What gets me through those days – any day, really – is little things that allow me to mentally retrench: an afternoon cup of tea in a favorite cup; reading a good book that makes me feel happy; morning and evening prayer to bookend my days; fleece sheets on my bed to snuggle into at night. It’s also enjoying silence as I sit in my car at the school pick-up, listening to 40’s music as I cook dinner and slowly eating a really good piece of chocolate. Some days a few of these brighten me up; other days call for every one of them.